Assassins of the Turquoise Palace (9 page)

“That’s them,” he exclaimed, then pressed a hand against his forehead and shut his eyes.

“It’s all difficult, very difficult, to have to look at these pictures and relive that night whenever something like this comes up,” Parviz told the visitors.

Seeing the sympathetic expressions on their faces, he asked if they might take a short break. The agents consented. The afternoon being young, the guests welcomed the idea of freshly brewed coffee.

They walked to the common personnel room across the hall. Parviz took his time rinsing the pitcher and setting the
coffeemaker. Over the sounds of the dripping and snorting of the machine, the agents talked about the heavy toll investigations always took on victims, casting compassionate glances at Parviz.

As he poured coffee, he asked who they thought was the culprit behind the murders. The agents turned silent, shaking their heads. After a few perfunctory sips Parviz announced that the caffeine had done its magic, rose from his seat, and led the way back to his office for a last round at the albums.

“I’ve got something you really want, Norbert. Something that will make you quit whatever you’re doing to walk over to my office right away,” the exuberant Parviz whispered into the receiver, moments after the agents left.

“You found a photo of Darabi?” Norbert asked.

Parviz said that he had done better than that.

“You found a photo of Yousef?”

Pride rang in Parviz’s voice as he repeated that he had done even better.

“You found a photo of Rhayel?” Norbert asked, gleeful and impatient.

“I’ve got a photo of all three!” Parviz burst out.

“This makes me very nervous!” Norbert said, though it was joy, not nervousness, echoing in his voice.

“Let’s just pray for the well-being of the unknown secretary in whose key ring hangs a master key, and whose hands run the Xerox at the speed of light.”

“Don’t move! I’ll be right over.”

• • •

That night, the first exclusive photo of the men involved in the Mykonos murders aired on the local broadcast
Berliner Abend schau
. The riveting segment was narrated by Norbert over a collage of pictures, beginning with the scene of the crime.

Tonight, we focus on the investigation, which, despite all the evidence, has yielded few certainties on the part of the authorities. The federal prosecutor maintains that rival Kurdish groups are likely to have ordered the murders on September 17 at the Mykonos restaurant. But slowly, Iran’s regime is emerging as the true culprit. Many feel that the German and international communities are not interested in shedding light on this crime.

The montage of photos faded into the sight of Parviz and Mehdi seated side-by-side on a leather sofa. Norbert addressed them, and they answered sheepishly, each ending the other’s sentence.

“Yes. I went to the federal police headquarters in Meckenheim and looked at the lineup.”

“And so did I.”

“And I identified the killer who had shot at us that night with a machine gun.” Each nodded as the other spoke.

Mehdi added, “I think, though I can’t be certain, I recognized the same man in the lineup. I picked him out and was told by an agent afterward that it was a big, important step in the investigation. But no one has since come forward to acknowledge it at all.”

Norbert’s voice boomed again as highlighted sentences from the consul’s letter scrolled across the screen.

Then the bespectacled face of another exile appeared.

“I wrote a letter to the German foreign ministry requesting information about the Mykonos investigation. In response, they sent me a letter. Here’s what it says: ‘We have no conclusive evidence yet. No real signs confirming who is behind this crime one way or another.’”

Anger swept across the interviewee’s face as he stared into the camera. After a long pause, he went on to read another passage from the same letter. “‘Despite your . . .’” he poked his chest feverishly, “‘. . .
your
claims and accusations of the involvement of the Iranian regime.’”

He lifted his head, stared silently into the camera once more, and added a final ultimatum. “We, the Iranians of Berlin, demand that all documents regarding this case be made public immediately.”

The segment caused a sensation, even without the revelations about the ballistic results from the weapons. Ordinary Berliners who, until then, had only seen phantom photos of the accused, were shaken by their real faces. The images renewed the public’s fury, but this time the suggestion of a political cover-up spurred an unprecedented outcry.

At dawn, Norbert rang Parviz to warn that the federal police had just contacted the station and their agents were en route to the studio.

“I’m sure they’ll want to see you next. Lay low! They’re mad as hell!”

That afternoon the director of the criminal division summoned Parviz to his office. Parviz went reluctantly. Without moving from his desk, the director cast a livid look at the visitor and told him to take a seat, pointing to a chair across his desk.

“But put your briefcase by the door first!”

The request sounded odd to Parviz, who asked the reason.

“You know why! You can steal a piece of gum out of someone’s mouth and he wouldn’t know it,” the director grunted. “Just tell me how you stole the photos.”

“Photos?” Parviz, startled by the man’s fury, tried to stall as he gathered his thoughts. “The ones on the TV program last night?”

The director glared at him in silence, then turned to his secretary and asked, “Won’t you return to your desk, please? We need a few moments alone.”

As the door shut behind her, the director glared at the visitor once again. Parviz threw his shoulders up, seeming unaffected.

“You have nothing to say?” the director thundered.

Parviz only rose and walked to the door. The director changed his tone and said in a softer voice, “Let me see you to the elevator.”

In the hallway, he pressed again. “No one’s here, see? I just need to know, for my own sake, how you did it.”

“I’ve done nothing, sir,” Parviz said, watching the arrows above the elevator door, avoiding his inquisitor’s gaze.

When the doors opened, the director made a last plea. “Why don’t we go down on foot?”

They descended the stairs together. At the bottom, the director pointed out that they were on the street, beyond the agency’s walls or its surveillance cameras. Sounding defeated, he asked yet again, “Man to man, tell me: how did you do it?”

“Do what?”

“You stole those photos and I must know how.”

“I’m not a thief, sir, but since you insist, I’ll tell you who did it,” Parviz retorted.

“Who?”

“
You
did!”

“
I
? Why would you say such an absurd thing?” the director, furious again, blurted.

“Because I can. Because I’m the victim, and you are the BKA. People will believe what I say over the word of a bureaucrat any day. They themselves will think up why you may have done it—rivalry, corruption, whistle-blowing. There’s no limit to the public’s imagination.”

The director was mum. Parviz wished him a pleasant day, turned on his heel, and walked away. He fought hard to suppress the urge to look back.

10

Despite what many think, there is freedom of speech in Iran. Only, there’s no freedom after speech.

—Hadi Khorsandi, exiled Iranian satirist

When it came to mastering a case, Bruno Jost had no patience for leisurely introductions. He devoured his subject, now Iran, and not only its politics, but also its art and culture. His guide and Persian-German interpreter, Zamankhan, had drawn up a list of books for him to read, and among other lessons he had taken Jost to a Persian restaurant. The interpreter recommended the kebabs: the grilled meat that readily appealed to the Western palate. But since the urgency of the investigation weighed so heavily on him, Jost ordered what the menu listed as “the most truly Iranian dish of all”—a bowl of Ghormeh Sabzi, an herb stew.

“It goes over the saffron rice,” the interpreter instructed. He showed how the dried lime had to be squeezed to let the flavor seep into the mix of leek, parsley, chive, scallion, cilantro, and fenugreek. Then he scooped a spoonful of stew and daintily placed it over a spoonful of rice. He was a highly measured man whose precision extended far beyond syntax (he always introduced himself by pausing over the syllables of his own name,
Za-man-khan
). Jost watched him, then simply emptied the bowl over the mound of rice and dug in; he was a passionate man who readily immersed himself in the unfamiliar.

If the grubby look of the stew made the prosecutor squeamish, his face did not show it. After the first mouthful, he pondered. It was strangely delectable; tart to be sure, but also lush and fragrant—a profusion of flavors that hinted at the distinct origins of each ingredient yet delivered a single exotic taste. Jost did not leave the restaurant till he had a copy of the recipe. His enthusiasm for the dish had as much to do with palate as intellect. He cherished the surprise of seeing herbs he had known only as garnish become a meal and, even more, that it was, per its description,
truly Iranian
, not known among Arabs. The dish—unexpected, and rare—mirrored the surprise of his recent encounter with Iran.

Like most educated Westerners, Bruno Jost held two irreconcilable views of Iran: a rich ancient civilization and a savage theocracy. He discovered the rift in his own perspective, only after beginning to probe into the Mykonos case. One view was of the exotic Persia—its bygone glories and
empires, its historic ruins, its poets, and its miniatures and rugs. The other was of the shiite hub of hostility—the fist-throwing mobs on the evening news, their hateful chants against the West, the fanatical rulers inciting violence. His reverence for Persia had sufficed in the past, but now that he had a murder to solve, it was no longer enough.

To consider Tehran as the mastermind of the Mykonos murders made Jost uneasy because it went against Germany’s diplomatic ethos. In 1988, four months after the end of the Iran-Iraq war, Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher made history by becoming the first Western European senior official to visit Tehran in many years. He had gone a skeptic and returned an optimist: under the leadership of its new president, Rafsanjani, Iran was ready to embrace Europe once more, or so Genscher believed. The era of radicalism had ended, giving Europe the chance to back the forces of moderation by helping Iran recover from war. German businesses cheered the notion, and so did most Germans.

Mykonos was not the first terrorism case Jost had handled. He had seen his share of corpses in pools of blood. Nor was it his first case dealing with troubled territories beyond his own country: he had investigated several high profile cases involving Turks, Yugoslavs, and Lebanese in the past. But the more he learned about this case, about Iran, the greater grew its allure to the prosecutor. Its intrigue was boundless. To discover, for instance, that the members of the terror team were from Iran and Lebanon and did not all speak the same language had surprised him. They
communicated in Arabic, but for the Persian-speaking Iranians on the team, it had been a second language. He no longer dismissed details.

“Why are some turbans black and others white?” he asked Zamankhan, the interpreter. The black turban, he was told, is worn exclusively by those who claimed to be the descendants of the Prophet Muhammad.

A mosque ceased to be simply a place of worship. That, too, he learned when Zamankhan explained that the Imam Jafar Mosque in Berlin, where Darabi was a major benefactor, did not welcome all Muslims. It was a hub for radical Shiites, funded mostly by Tehran.

Though the evidence against Tehran quickly began to outweigh that against the PKK, the prosecutor would not rule the Turkish group out—not publicly. He could not. Bonn was carefully monitoring the case. On September 18, the office of the chief federal prosecutor released Jost’s memo naming Tehran a possible suspect. Immediately after its release, the chief federal prosecutor, Alexander von Stahl, was severely reprimanded by the justice ministry. His office was never to release another statement without the justice ministry’s approval.

Calls from “concerned colleagues” had come in, advising Jost to let law yield to diplomacy. They counseled that in cases as important as Mykonos, lawyers were best to leave politicians in charge and limit the scope of their investigation, a move that would “surely benefit one’s future career.”

He courteously listened, then did the only thing he could do—investigate.

Exiled Iranians, too, had besieged his office with messages of their own, demanding that he expand the scope of the investigation beyond the men in custody to implicate their masters. But since he fiercely protected the case from others who wished to influence it, he kept his distance from the exiles. He was wary of political oppositions and of falling prey to a plot by former leaders who might use him to revive their own failed enterprise.

What consumed him was neither the prospects of his future career nor the pressures from invested parties. It was the question of motive. To imagine that Tehran, a government ruling over sixty million citizens, was threatened by a minority of four million seemed implausible to him. Besides, the historians he had consulted unanimously agreed that, compared to the Kurds elsewhere, Iran’s Kurds had always led far better lives. Given the ancient history of camaraderie among the Iranians and the Kurds why would Tehran wage war against them?

VIENNA
. He thought again of the word he had written in block letters during his first night on the case. From the beginning, the ghost of another Kurdish leader, the Doctor’s predecessor, Abdulrahman Ghassemlou, had hovered over the investigation. Ghassemlou and two associates had been shot at an apartment in Vienna in July 1989. The similarities between the two murders—three Kurdish leaders killed in two neighboring countries within three years—were great enough to warrant a collegial visit. So Jost flew to Vienna to consult his counterparts across the border.

In meeting and reviewing the findings of the Austrian investigators, Jost quickly learned some key facts. Ghassemlou was widely popular. There had never been any doubt that his assassins were non-Kurds because in the ’80s even his staunchest rivals could not have survived the ravages of the regime and war without his stewardship. Unlike the assassins in Berlin, the ones in Vienna had left a clear trail that had led to Iran’s embassy. One assassin had even been caught, but once the ties between him and the embassy were discovered, the Austrian administration had intervened. Within two weeks, the prisoner was escorted onto a plane headed for Tehran. A few outraged parliamentarians launched their own investigations and found that the release had come on the heels of a major weapons deal with Iran.

To the Austrians, the motive was hardly a mystery: Tehran feared Ghassemlou. He had first emerged on the political scene in the early 1970s, and become a national figure by the late 1980s. He was beloved by Kurds and non-Kurds alike. Unlike the Doctor, the globe-trotting Ghassemlou was charismatic—as equally at ease in mountains of Kurdistan as on the sidewalks of Europe, sipping espresso beside his Czech wife. Educated in France, he moved between Paris and Prague as effortlessly as he did between French and the Czech language. After the Ayatollah came to power in 1979, Ghassemlou became the patron saint of all persecuted Iranians who took shelter in Kurdistan. His popularity transcended his own territory. Neither defeated nor driven into exile, he stayed in Iran and became a symbol of both resistance and
hope. In 1989, more frail than ever from the bruises of a war whose only conquest had been swaths of ruins and millions dead or maimed, Tehran feared its own demise, and the electrifying Ghassemlou who could bring it about.

What he learned from the Austrians broadened Jost’s under standing of the history behind the murders. Tehran had less to fear in the Doctor, who was neither as popular nor as charismatic as his predecessor. But by 1992 there was more to fear in regional developments—in Kuwait, which the Americans had invaded, and in northern Iraq where the Kurds were finally given autonomy. Tehran’s motive was a mystery as long as Jost believed the Kurds were a lone, powerless minority. But since the Gulf War, the Kurds were no longer alone. They were a minority backed by America, Iran’s archenemy, whose influence threatened to deepen and spread among the neighboring Kurds.

Jost returned home with a radically different assessment of Iran than the one Foreign Minister Genscher had. To the diplomat, the new Tehran had appeared on the brink of moderation. To the prosecutor, all that was new about Tehran was its mask of moderation. Doubts no longer plagued him. He had uncovered the motive, and solved the case. Yet he found no relief in all these discoveries. He had only traded doubt for anxiety. He thought about the near future, a time when he would make his findings public. Could an irate Tehran strike against his family? He considered the dangers he might be exposing his children to. The fallout
from the trial ahead would hardly be contained within the courtroom. It was bound to reach into his home, and so he needed Angela’s consent to continue on.

“Do the right thing, Bruno. Do what your conscience tells you to do,” she said, simply and elegantly, without a moment’s hesitation.

Her swift response shook Jost, forcing him to make the very arguments he had expected
her
to make: Their privacy would be lost. They would live under siege for the foreseeable future, with bodyguards following them at every step. They might have to go into hiding. But she did not flinch. She shrugged and said that she knew he would never be content quitting or giving the case less than his all. She knew living with the burden of his cowardice would crush them just as mortally as the dangers his valor might bring upon them.

Angela was the one to prepare their children for the sudden changes that swept through their household. A watch post was built on the sidewalk of their residence, and two guards monitored the house at all hours. Two other guards in plain clothes shadowed Jost outside of home. The reinforcements to the Jost house became the talk of the neighborhood. Rumors began to spread about a surveillance camera lodged in their mailbox, and about the house itself being only a facade hiding the family living in a single room underground. Eight-year-old Alex thrived on the intrigue of his father’s new case, but the teenage Barbara dreaded it. Angela, who was not the brooding
kind, consoled her daughter by promising not Bruno’s safety, but his happiness.

“He’ll be a better father if he does what he loves to do.”

The inconveniences of life with Bruno were, after all, rooted in the very qualities Angela loved in him—above all his single-minded dedication to the objects of his passion. She drew strength from his clarity of purpose, as if nothing could ever blur his view of the truth. He could be contemplative, but never equivocal. She had learned that about him at seventeen when they first met on a field trip. Two days after they had declared their love to each other, he found out that Angela had yet to break the news of their relationship to the young Frenchman she had been dating. He briefly perused her German-French dictionary and jotted a few words on a piece of paper. Then he went looking for his rival. Finding him, Jost pointed to Angela, and said, “
C’est finis
.”

When the young man seemed puzzled, Jost grabbed Angela’s hand and, reverting to German, said, “She’s with me now, see? You may be on your way!
Au revoir!
”

Four years later, after she completed her degree in French literature and he had entered law school, they were married.

Despite his newfound certainty about the case, Jost could show no sign of it publicly. The office of the chief federal prosecutor was in Bonn’s grip. No interviews were to be granted, no statements to be issued without submitting them to the justice ministry for clearance first. For the moment, Jost did not mind the tyranny; he had an indictment
to draft. The flurry of inquiries was certain to sweep him up with the start of the trial. Until then, he reveled in the imposed silence. He had always done his best work in quiet.

To Parviz, however, silence was an insult. Any day that ended without a mention of his murdered friends in the news was another nail in their coffins. The passing of several weeks without a single statement from the federal prosecutor alarmed him. Years of activism had taught Parviz many lessons—above all that justice was a debt to wrest from powerful men who thrived in silence. Clamor was essential, effective, and, most importantly, inexpensive. Such was his state of mind just before he committed one of the great betrayals of his life.

In the early days after the murders, an inexperienced reporter from the
Bild
, a popular tabloid, had approached Parviz. He had cringed upon hearing the name of the publication, but the reporter’s eyes, gleaming with enthusiasm, his obvious hunger for a serious story, had disarmed Parviz. The
Bild
was Europe’s best-selling paper and had a large circulation worldwide. An article in the
Bild
would thrust the case into the scope of a whole new audience. So had gone the inner reasoning that led him to keep the reporter’s contacts.